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Notes -
To be clear, my stance only applies when (a subcomponent of) the justice system is clearly and obviously corrupt. If you have a corrupt local judge/jury that can simply try murderers and declare them not guilty, which with double jeopardy makes them not guilty permanently, then what you have is worse than there literally being no local justice system, because it actively protects murderers from higher courts. I don't think prosecutors have an appeal process to higher courts when they get an unjust "not-guilty" unless there's some clear explicit corruption beyond "hopelessly racist jury".
Now, obviously there are better solutions to the detecting and ousting of corrupt local courts than just allowing vigilantism. But, conditional on someone finding themself in a situation in which the courts are clearly and obviously corrupt and the higher courts have not yet noticed or cared enough to fix the issue, then vigilantism might be the trigger needed to make them care. And, if the higher court finds that "whoops, this guy was obviously guilty, the court was negligent in finding them not guilty, and we should have stopped this corruption a long time ago, sorry", then it would be appropriate to lessen the sentence of the vigilante.
The four major goals of punishment are
1: retribution
2:rehabilitation
3:deterrence
4: incapacitation
Conditional on the higher courts finding that the victims were clearly and obviously guilty and only got free due to corruption, most of these goals don't apply to the vigilante. Retribution is less necessary because the victims, being murderous scum, deserved what they got and don't need to avenged. Rehabilitation isn't especially necessary because the vigilante is not broken or morally corrupt, they know right from wrong and only acted in violence against murderous scum. Similarly, incapacitation is entirely unnecessary: they are not at risk of re-offending unless someone else decides to kidnap and rape their daughter.
Deterrence could go either way depending on how far you generalize the behavior and the obviousness of the injustice the vigilante is fixing. We want to deter wannabe heroes who take the law into their own hands after they don't get their way in a fair trial. But I contend that vigilantism is a just and beneficial response in a corrupt system. First, imagine an oppressive regime in some foreign dictatorship rather than the American justice system, I would think it clear that if the law does not protect you then protecting yourself is better than simply bowing and being oppressed. Then imagine small pockets in America where the American justice system is secretly replaced by courts run by the evil dictatorship. Therefore, deterring vigilantism in that tiny subset of scenarios is actively bad, because it's very important to deter real criminals, and it's better that vigilantes deter them than literally no one. Vigilantism is bad only in healthy societies where the police are already fulfilling the role of deterring criminals to the point that adding vigilantes has diminishing returns and creates too many false positives to be worth it.
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